Don't Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey From the End of the Bench to the End of the Bench

by Mark Titus

  We often ended practice with just one four-minute war, but because we had a week off in between our game with Michigan and our game with the Buzzcuts and therefore didn’t need to be too concerned with resting our legs, Coach decided to raise the stakes and end practice with a best-of-three series of four-minute wars, with the losing team having to run a double suicide. After it worked so well and brought our team together so much at the SWAT obstacle course, we split into the same two teams, with the veterans on one team and the new guys on the other.

  The first two four-minute wars were boring and are entirely irrelevant to the story, so I’ll just tell you that the new guys won the first and we won the second, and we’ll move on. In fact, we’ll just advance the story all the way to the waning moments of the third and deciding four-minute war, where we found ourselves down by three with 20 seconds left. Now, if you remember the story from earlier about how Daequan snubbed me in an AAU game instead of running the play that was drawn up in the huddle, then you might be getting ahead of yourself here and think that this situation is headed in the same direction.

  Instead of checking in after sitting on the bench for the entire game, this time I actually played a ton and, believe it or not, had plays drawn up for me throughout the scrimmages because I was shooting the ball so well. I had been so good, in fact, that I kind of expected the final play to go to me, but our assistant coach made the foolish decision to put the ball in Jamar’s hands instead, most likely because he was our leading scorer and senior captain and I was just some pudgy sophomore walk-on. But luckily for our coach, I was able to save his ass and absolve him of the inexcusable sin of breaking the golden rule of basketball, otherwise known as “getting the rock to the man with the hot hand.”

  The assistant coach’s plan was for Jamar to wait until the clock wound down to 10 seconds, come off a ball screen, create separation from the defense, and let a three fly. And that’s almost what happened. The only problem, though, was that the whole creating separation thing was kinda tricky because the defense knew what was coming, so when Jamar came off of Othello’s ball screen, it provided a chance for whoever was guarding Othello to double-team Jamar. With two guys in his face, Jamar was forced to shoot a fadeaway three that never had much of a chance and clanked off the front of the rim (sound familiar?).

  But since Othello’s defender had left him wide open, Othello had a clear path to the basket and grabbed the rebound with about five seconds left. His instincts kicked in, and he took a forceful dribble to power his way toward the basket for a layup, but we were down by three, so I yelled to get his attention and help him realize that a layup wouldn’t have helped us at all. It must’ve worked because he jumped, changed his mind midair, and threw a pass across the court in my direction. I took a couple of steps to where the ball was headed, caught it, and released the shot just before the buzzer sounded.

  Swish.

  Duh.

  After I hit the scrimmage-tying shot at the buzzer, the gym exploded in pandemonium, and by that I mean I sought out The Villain and executed the “suck it” crotch chop in his face and Othello and a few of my teammates jumped on my back in celebration. It was the biggest shot I ever made in my career at Ohio State, and even though it didn’t happen in an actual game, it didn’t make it any less significant for me because our practices were always games to me (and our games were always off days). As amazing as it was to save our team from a double suicide, even more impressive was that I managed to get Othello to forget about the plane ride from Penn State for a brief moment, as evidenced by the fact that he gave me an excited bear hug and softly whispered in my ear that he would always be my BFF. (Note: that last part might be revisionist history.) Sadly, this burying of the hatchet was short-lived because of Jamar.

  To settle the tie, Coach Matta had us play an overtime period in which the first team to score five points would win. I was hoping we would settle the tie like all normal, civilized human beings settle ties: a group game of “Mercy” with the last man standing claiming the win for his team. But I guess Coach Matta’s idea seemed like a fair alternative. Anyway, we won the tip and got the ball, but we couldn’t capitalize on our first possession because Jamar got hammered on a drive to the basket and Coach Groce, who was one of our assistant coaches (the same coach who conned me into agreeing to be a manager and is now the head coach at Ohio University), decided to not call a foul. As he ran back on defense, Jamar had some words for Coach Groce (one of which started with “b” and rhymed with “bullshit”), but it was really nothing more than your standard, run-of-the-mill instance of a player cursing out a coach. Standard, that is, until less than a minute later.

  Twenty seconds after not getting the foul called for him, Jamar was floored by a blatant moving screen set by Kosta to free up whoever it was Jamar was defending. Again, Coach Groce swallowed his whistle and told Jamar to get up while whoever Jamar was guarding sank a wide-open three. And again Jamar wasn’t exactly thrilled with not getting a foul called in his favor. As he got up off the ground, he yelled, “That’s fucking bullshit,” directly at Coach Groce while slowly dribbling the ball back up the court.

  This was the last straw for Groce. He chimed back with “What’s that, Jamar?” even though he had obviously heard Jamar the first time.

  Jamar walked toward Groce and emphatically repeated himself. “That’s fucking bullshit and you know it.”

  With things rapidly escalating out of control, Groce did the only thing he really could’ve done in that situation—he called a technical foul on Jamar and threatened to call a second if Jamar didn’t calm down.

  As I’m sure you could have guessed, neither the first tech nor the threat of a second had any effect whatsoever on Jamar, as evidenced by the fact that he straight up told Groce: “I don’t give a fuck about your technicals.”

  Groce decided to test how true this statement was and rang Jamar up for a second tech, and actually said, “You’re outta here!” as he did that hand motion umpires do when they eject guys from baseball games.

  Once again, this did nothing to deter Jamar. He told Groce he didn’t care if he was ejected because he didn’t want to be there anyway, and he started back to the locker room, sprinkling in another handful of nasty curse words. But before he could get off the court, Groce, honest to God, called a third technical foul on Jamar, despite the fact that Jamar had already been “ejected” and had already received the maximum number of techs one player can get in a single game. This third tech triggered yet another outburst from Jamar, which was really nothing more than a bunch of F-bombs capped off with him telling Groce to “suck my dick” as he finally made his way to the locker room.

  Unable to just let it go without getting the last word, Groce—I kid you not—called a fourth tech on Jamar, and in doing so broke the record set by Ted Valentine, who rang up Bob Knight for a then-unprecedented three techs in a game between Indiana and Illinois in 1998. By now, most of the guys on the team and even Coach Matta couldn’t hold back the laughter, thanks to the combination of Jamar’s anger management issues and Groce’s serious commitment to staying in character as a referee instead of embracing his role as assistant coach and attempting to diffuse the problem. But I didn’t laugh for long because once the dust settled, the new guys were granted eight free throws as a result of Jamar’s four techs and only had to hit two of the eight to clinch the win. They made the first two they shot, my team ran a double suicide, and just like that the biggest shot of my Ohio State career was made entirely irrelevant (since, ya know, it was such a relevant shot before all of that happened).

  In all honesty, if the Bananas in Pajamas would have somehow teleported themselves to our arena, walked out to midcourt, started 69ing, and then finished each other off with a couple rusty trombones before sprouting wings and flying away, I still don’t think I would have been as genuinely shocked as I was when all this went down. Jamar had a history of being stubborn with authority, but never would I have thought he’d get borderline vio
lent with one of our coaches just because he didn’t get a couple fouls called for him. (In his defense, they really were inexcusably bad no-calls.) That in and of itself was pretty crazy, and then Coach Groce took it to another level by not only refusing to break character as a referee (he was like those Pioneer Village people from South Park who were a little too committed to acting like it was 1864), but also calling a laughable number of technical fouls as if imaginary techs in an intrasquad scrimmage that was closed to the public were really going to calm Jamar down. (I like to think that before he called each of his last three techs, Groce thought to himself, This time it has to work.) But most incredible of all, Jamar’s tirade erased the greatest on-court accomplishment of my Ohio State career and the one thing I thought was going to help squash Othello’s beef with me. And all of this happened in a matter of minutes. I was speechless.

  I guess Jamar’s outburst was inevitable considering that he announced on a daily basis in the locker room how many days were left until his career at Ohio State was finally over. Plus, after being able to regularly challenge authority without consequence, it was only a matter of time before he tested his limit and everything boiled over. Obviously a lot of the blame lies with Jamar, but it should also be noted that throughout the season our coaches enabled his defiant behavior more than those Family Feud contestants who enable their teammates’ stupidity by saying “Good answer” when their teammate responds to “Name a U.S. president” with “Chicken nuggets.”

  He truly did get away with anything he wanted all season, so when he was a no-show for practice the next two days (he eventually came to practice three days after the incident and went about his business as if nothing ever happened and he hadn’t literally walked out on his teammates) and was only punished by being forced to sit out the first four minutes of the Wisconsin game, well, let’s just say I wasn’t too surprised. After all, because we were on the bubble for an NCAA Tournament berth, the game against the Buzzcuts was a must-win for us, and it was clear that we had no shot of winning without Jamar. So we basically sold our souls by giving him a slap on the wrist even though he probably should have been suspended for at least one game if not kicked off the team altogether, and then we looked even worse when we still lost to the Buzzcuts by five.

  The truth is that the only reason I complain about Jamar is because I’m jealous. I’ve always thought he was a good guy underneath his tough exterior, and he certainly was always nice to me when he probably could have justifiably punched me in the throat on a few occasions. Sure we were never best friends, but I did go to his wedding in 2008, and should I get invited, I’ll definitely go to his second, third, and even fourth weddings too. Like I said, other than killing my moment of glory in practice, my only issue with him was that I was jealous that he could essentially quit the team for two days after telling one of our coaches to F off and go on and on about how badly he wanted to leave, and only be punished with a four-minute suspension (and, of course, four technical fouls in practice). Meanwhile, when I simply (and respectfully, I might add) called my high school coach an asshole after he asked me for my honest opinion, I had to sit out the entire first half of one of our biggest games of the year and lost my chance at going to Harvard. It just wasn’t fair.

  Even though we were still considered to be on the bubble after the Wisconsin loss, I was pretty sure that after blowing that game we had virtually no shot at making the NCAA Tournament. We were 17–10 and had four games left in the regular season, with three against ranked teams and two on the road. Sure playing ranked teams and road games provided us with some great opportunities to play our way back into the tournament with some quality wins, but with all of these games coming on the heels of the Jamar debacle, it was pretty obvious to me that there was a better chance of finding an astrophysicist in an AND1 Mixtape Tour audience than there was of us coming together as a team to make one last push for the tournament. But then again, every sports movie ever made revolves around a player or team achieving the impossible, so could it be that all that had happened throughout the year was just the setup for us to circle the wagons and make an unbelievable and dramatic run at the end of the season?

  The answer is no. No, it couldn’t.

  We followed up the Wisconsin loss with a three-point loss at 12th-ranked Indiana that was really only close because Indiana’s coach, Kelvin Sampson, had resigned less than a week earlier and Indiana was in just as much disarray as we were. Again, it was an understandable loss considering Indiana was a highly ranked team playing at home, but in order to make the tournament, at some point you need to actually pull out the wins in these games. You also need to make sure that if you’re in the midst of a three-game losing streak toward the end of the season (and it’s the second three-game losing streak of the year), you don’t get blown out by 14 to an unranked Minnesota team in your next game, which is exactly what we did after the IU loss. And even though we eventually somehow closed out the regular season with a couple big wins against 15th-ranked Purdue and 18th-ranked Michigan State, it appeared as if the damage had already been done.

  Unfortunately, that suspicion was confirmed in our next game, as a loss to Michigan State in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament prompted Joe Lunardi to tell us to prepare our anus for Selection Sunday because there was no way in hell we were getting a bid to the NCAA Tournament.

  TWENTY

  If there’s one thing I learned during my four years of playing college basketball, it’s that—with the exception of his affinity for wearing turtlenecks underneath his blazers—Joe Lunardi never makes a wrong decision in March. Never. The dude predicts who will make the NCAA Tournament every year a lot like Mark May predicts Ohio State football games, with the only real differences being that he substitutes terrible predictions for predictions that always turn out to be right, he doesn’t show bias against a team that he’s been butt-hurt over for the last 30 years, he actually knows what he’s talking about, and he isn’t a complete and utter douche. Anyway, the freshmen on our team were unaware of Lunardi’s brilliance and foolishly thought he could be wrong in thinking that we wouldn’t make the tournament. But I knew better.

  We were 19–13 with a 3–9 record against ranked teams, our best player quit the team for two days without any real repercussions, our second-best player (Kosta) was an outcast, and our third-best player (The Villain) was crazy enough to try to start a fight with a walk-on over a bounce pass. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, no team with all of those things on their résumé had ever made the NCAA Tournament in the history of college basketball. And it wasn’t in the cards for us to be the first, because when we gathered in the locker room to watch CBS’s NCAA Tournament Selection Show, Greg Gumbel confirmed the inevitable—we didn’t make the NCAA Tournament and would have to settle for the NIT instead.

  As a consolation, we were given the number-one overall seed in the NIT, which was basically another way of saying that we had the best mediocre season of any team in the country. For our first game, we drew North Carolina–Asheville, led by Kenny George, who stood seven feet seven inches tall, weighed 370 pounds, and very well may have had a bigger penis than I did. But in the end, his penis did him no good in our game, as we cruised to an 18-point win in which I got to play in the final minute and do a whole lot of nothing. Our win over Asheville sent us to the second round, where we blew out Cal in a game that was played in St. John Arena (the old gym on Ohio State’s campus) because I’m pretty sure our arena (Schottenstein Center) was being used for a monster truck rally. The change in venues did nothing to deter my performance, though, as I was able to again stand in the corner and not even touch the ball as I watched the final half-minute of the game tick off the clock.

  Our third-round game was back in the Schottenstein Center against Dayton in front of a capacity crowd with a trip to the NIT semifinals at Madison Square Garden in New York City on the line. (You bet your ass I just used nine prepositions in a single sentence.) Because Dayton is just an hour’s drive fr
om Columbus, the Flyers brought a ton of fans with them and really fed off that huge block of support as they completely outplayed us in the first half and took a one-point lead into halftime. But in the second half, we came out like our dicks were on fire, took complete control of the game, and ballooned our lead to as many as 18 points before ultimately winning by 11. Other than the fact that it sent us back to the Big Apple for the second time that season, what made this game so memorable for me was that it marked the one and only time during my college career in which I talked trash on the court during an actual game.

  I checked in for the game’s final minute and fully expected to go through the motions as usual and just run out the clock. But Dayton had other ideas. After making a shot with 53 seconds left to cut our lead to 13, they applied a full-court press and put me in the uncomfortable position of having to actually exert effort on the court, which was a concept that was pretty foreign to me at that point of the season. Dayton’s fans and the commentators most likely thought it was inspiring to see the Flyers not give up and keep playing hard until the final buzzer, but my grandmother taught me a couple of different words for it—hogwash and phooey.

  I felt like I needed to express my displeasure to the Dayton player who was tightly guarding me 90 feet from the basket despite the game being all but over, and did so by saying, “Listen, guy. I’m a walk-on, we’re blowing you out, and there’s less than a minute left to play. Face it—this game is over. So in the words of Ludacris, ‘Get back, motherfucker. You don’t know me like that.’ ”